Technology

You know what's harder than debugging? Maintenance, especially of someone else's code, keeping up to date with security exploits, revamping UX etc. which is why github is full of write only (as in never read, never changed) slop projects. That's a critical part of a software project with any lifespan.

And then there's integrating new functionality.

Without a solid architecture (which AI sucks at), strict code readability standards (ditto, but improving) and nuanced reviewing of potential additions to the codebase (ditto) what you get is a spagettified mess. It ends up costing more to maintain and improve than just starting fresh.

The promise of the AI bros was that by the time you needed to maintain or extend, you could just get the next version of Claude or whatever to do it, as it's capabilities would have improved. That was a lie, and LLMs have hit a logarithmic wall where throwing more compute and bigger training sets at it produces diminishing returns. No AGI for you (unless some genius finds a new architecture). Frameworks / harnesses are still improving, but there's only so far that can go.

The amount of technical debt that has been racked up by the last two years of AI coding is staggering to contemplate, and the industry will be dealing the fallout for years. Companies will collapse, and god help you if you've used it liberally in a codebase as large as an OS - looking at you Microslop.

since no one else will read the dreaded wAlL Of tEXt.

It's okay I can just have an AI summarise it for me.

God forbid we think for ourselves and have real conversations.

Maybe they were exercising their experience by identifying valid material. No point rewriting a treatise when some guy's blog already has a perfectly good article.

Yeah I got to this in the blog and stopped:

" I don't think that we're any safer than before. That's because finding vulnerabilities has never been the bottleneck in information security. The bottleneck isn't even verifying a vulnerability report and validating its severity, as time consuming as that is. The bottleneck isn't determining the fix, creating the patch, or publishing a new release. The bottleneck is still, as ever before, getting the goddamn packages updated. "

Dude thinks security through obscurity is valid and thinks running

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Is the really hard part.

It isn't even the LLM. Its the data scraped from the internet wholesale and users contributing to corps by use. Not to mention the staggering amount of engineers turning that raw data into better output. The LLM just spits those billions of dollars of effort back out. I only pick this nit because too many people see local LLM and think that's where the magic happens. It is just a flash in the pan. you need an internal combustion engine, transmission, wheels, chassis, cabin, and probably some seats if you want to get anywhere with it. That said, it is the concentration of effort. Individuals can't really rival that. I wonder if there are any initiatives in the open source community with this mindset...

More like somebody taught their calculator to spell OBOE ShOES. It's still a calculator.